Daniel sobered slightly. “Not the full weight, I’ll admit,” he said, “but they’ll have the Princess Cecile.”
“By God!” Woetjans said. She stepped sideways—Pasternak, prepared, gave her room—and slammed the bulkhead between the missile and gunnery consoles with her hand. Spacers passing along the corridor glanced into the bridge in concern.
“By God, who wouldn’t that be enough for?” Woetjans said. “And by God, before we’re done it’ll be enough for those sneaking bastards that shot at us too!”
“I certainly hope so,” Daniel said, his face beaming with anticipation. “I certainly do.”
* * *
The riggers came inside with the thumps and crashing of even greater haste than their usual. Before the inner lock was closed, Woetjans unlatched her visor and shouted, “Sir! We’re battle-rigged and ready to roll!”
Daniel looked at his display—he’d trust his bosun over whatever the electronics said, but spacers become old spacers by double-checking everything—and saw that the schematic too believed the corvette was rigged for immediate action. The sixteen antennas on the rings nearest the bow and stern—A, B, E, and F—were folded along the hull. That gave free traverse to the gun turrets and permitted missile launches without the risk of losing sails to the antimatter exhausts.
The Princess Cecile would handle like a pig on entry and exit from the Matrix, but this was a hop of short duration: S1, the sun about which Dalbriggan rotated, was noticeably brighter than other stars in a hullside view of the corvette’s surroundings. Daniel had entered the system to within 200 million miles of Dalbriggan, then paused to rerig.
“Preparing to enter the Matrix . . .” Daniel announced over the warning chimes. He felt forces shifting, finding a balance that wasn’t of the human universe. “Now!”
The Princess Cecile and her crew entered the Matrix. To Daniel it was the motion of a coin flipping in some fourth dimension, obverse/reverse/obverse/reverse, though he knew others described the experience in very different fashions. The reality was beyond human understanding, so no analogy could be more than partial.
Almost as the Princess Cecile entered, the clock began counting down seconds to exit. The intermediate appearance within the S1 system didn’t constitute a risk of detection: the Princess Cecile would be arriving above Dalbriggan before the light of her previous exit had reached observers on the planet.
“Action stations!” Daniel ordered, but of course the crew had been at action stations for most of the past hour. Betts and Sun were intent on their displays; Adele alone was watching Daniel. The tension at the corners of her eyes was due to the Matrix, not because of fear of what they would meet when they returned to sidereal space. “Prepare to exit the Matrix!”
Vibration at his nerve cores, the feeling of wires drawn to the point of rupture—
Exit!
Gasping, suddenly aware that he’d been holding his breath for the past minute or more, Daniel keyed his transmitter. It was set to 15kH, the hailing frequency here in the Sack in contrast to the 10kH push used generally on the worlds outside.
“RCS Princess Cecile to Dalbriggan Control,” he announced. “We’re scrubbing velocity with a circuit of your planet, then we’ll land at Council Field. Wake your chief up. This is his lucky day, whether he knows it or not. RCN over.”
They were a hundred thousand miles out from Dalbriggan. They’d returned to sidereal space squarely over Council Field, which the Sailing Directions said served as a capital for as much of the cluster as was under unified control at the moment. It was a dry-land site. Daniel counted thirty-seven ships on the ground, though some of them were probably hulks as incapable of star travel as his own left boot.
None of the vessels was the size of the Princess Cecile, and few were more than half her size. They bristled with light plasma cannon, sometimes in fixed mountings of four and eight tubes like a bank of organ pipes. At close range a rack like that could strip a merchantman’s sails in a matter of seconds without endangering the hull and valuable cargo.
“RCN ship, this is Dalbriggan,” responded a voice promptly. “You want to wake up the Astrogator, you go right ahead. Maybe if he’s feeling kindly, he’ll cut your throat before he stuffs your balls in your mouth.”